Sioux Falls Fire and Rescue Matthew Vanden Top and Ryan Limesand look at a power line that is down April 9 on 32nd Street and West Avenue in Sioux Falls. / Emily Spartz / Argus Leader

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A Sioux Falls city councilor says last week’s ice storm exposed big weaknesses in the overhead power system in Sioux Falls, and he said it might be time to move that system underground.

Newer developments that already have underground power systems fared much better than older areas of town with overhead power lines, Councilor Kenny Anderson Jr. said. He added that new drilling techniques make it easier to bury power lines.

Anderson, who also is on the Xcel Energy South Dakota Advisory Board, said it could make sense over time to move overhead wires below ground. And he expects to talk with Xcel officials about it now that the city is in recovery mode.

“It’s a question to see what the cost would be and if they felt it would be worthwhile to do,” Anderson said.

Anderson added that he is “perfectly happy with their response” to the storm, but fewer overhead lines in the future would mean less disruption to customers and fewer resources expended to get them back on the grid.

Xcel supplies the power to most customers in Sioux Falls. The utility mobilized workers from across the Midwest to help restore power in areas that were damaged in the ice storm.

Xcel spokesman Jim Wilcox said that burying the system already served by overhead power lines would be costly, though he didn’t know how much it would cost.

“I think it easily could cause our rates to have to double,” he said. “It would be an extraordinary expense.”

Last week, the Public Utilities Commission approved a 9 percent rate increase for Xcel, which will go into effect on May 1. The company had sought an increase of 11.5 percent.

PUC Chairman Gary Hanson said the utility made the case that it needed the extra money for a number of reasons. Xcel is decommissioning an old nuclear plant as well as older, dirtier coal-burning plants. Renewable energies are growing, but they also are more expensive than coal. And he said that federal environmental regulations are requiring power companies to make costly improvements.

“Those are significant,” he said.

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Hanson added that the PUC would not be the entity that could force Xcel to bury power lines. That would be the city.

He would know. As former Sioux Falls mayor and public utilities commissioner, Hanson and other city officials decided to require Xcel to bury distribution lines in downtown. Xcel refused, and the issue ended up in court.

The city eventually won in the state Supreme Court. And as streets in downtown were rebuilt, the utility was required to move its power distribution underground.

“It was, to a great extent, for aesthetics,” Hanson said. “We wanted all the lines in downtown underground.”

Hanson added that there’s merit to burying more of the overhead lines in the city’s inner core, but it would be expensive to do everything.

Wilcox said underground lines have their own problems. Overhead lines might be susceptible to wind and ice, but underground lines have issues with soil acidity, animals and digging.

“Those lines don’t last as long, and when you do have an outage, it takes a lot longer to fix,” he said.

Pierre, which runs its own citywide electric utility, decided 35 years ago to convert its overhead electric system to an underground system, utilities director Brad Palmer said. The transition happened section by section, and it took about 10 years to complete.

The system can spot an outage, and it has redundancy to continue supplying service in cases where there’s an outage. But it is more expensive.